Embodiments of this disclosure relate generally to interior lighting systems, and more particularly, to an interior illumination and lighting system for passenger cabins in commercial passenger airplanes.
The interior configuration, architecture, and illumination of airplanes have become relatively standardized. In general, most passenger aircraft compartments have sidewall members with a plurality of windows, a floor member and a ceiling member or assembly of some type. In addition, pluralities of rows of stowage or storage bins are positioned on the aircraft generally at the position between the sidewalls and the ceilings. For larger twin-aisle aircraft, rows of inboard stowage bins are also positioned over the seats positioned along the center of the passenger cabins.
In the past, conventional passenger illumination systems were based on fluorescent and incandescent light sources. However, light emitting diode (LED) based lighting systems offer several advantages over such conventional systems. These include smaller source size, lower electrical power consumption and longer operating lifetimes. Thus, presently, many passenger cabins are using illumination systems based on LEDs. Such LED based lighting systems have lead to improved configuration, architecture, illumination and aesthetics of passenger space of the aircraft. A key concept that has been developed to achieve the above is cross bin lighting in which the overhead storage bins are illuminated with one color and the ceiling structure between the bins is illuminated with another color. These colors may be varied during flight, but a typical color configuration is white light illumination for the overhead bins and blue light for the ceiling area. The use of multi-colors in cross bin lighting creates a feeling of more space to the passenger. In cross-bin lighting, a general requirement is that the light sources should not be visible to passengers in the cabin.
To achieve the general requirement that the light sources not be visible, in many LED illumination systems, cross bin illumination is achieved by placing the LED sources behind a valence above the storage bins. The basic requirement for hiding these sources is that the lighting sources must be below a plane that extends from the top of one valence to a tangent point along the curve of the opposite overhead bin. However, in certain aircraft, space and height constraints preclude the use of this approach to achieve cross bin lighting.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that overcomes the above problems.